Genomics Law Report

Over the last five or so years my law practice has focused increasingly on privacy law, both domestic and international. In hindsight, this was a predictable outcome: as an intellectual property lawyer, many of my clients do business on the Internet or are engaged in scientific research and development, with many of the latter in the health care area. These are the very kinds of people who need to worry about privacy—of their customers, users, patients, and subjects. As they started on focusing on privacy concerns, these clients turned to their IP lawyers for help, and my Robinson Bradshaw colleagues and I have tried to stay ahead of their needs.

As a consequence of my growing privacy practice, I am regularly called on to give overviews to other lawyers as well as non-lawyers in the scientific and business communities. I thought it might be useful to devote a GLR post to a privacy law summary targeted at readers who conduct medical and other scientific research. Privacy law is a transnational mess, so this will be a bit longer than I’d like—my apologies, and please don’t shoot the messenger—but I’ll try to cut through the legal jargon.
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Not too long ago, getting patents on software and business methods was all the rage. And concern about their effects was profound. In fact, in 2003 I spoke at a Federal Reserve Bank conference devoted to the question of whether such patents were an existential threat to the financial industry. Now, after a series of Supreme Court cases that brought about a dramatic shift in the approach taken by the lower courts and the Patent Office, the question is whether those patents are still alive. The answer is that they are, but barely, and their prognosis is bad.

Do these developments matter to people in the life sciences? The answer is a resounding yes. If we then ask why software patentability matters, the answer is that life sciences are increasingly focused on software-dependent data analysis.

These points were brought home to me when I spoke at another, more recent conference—the Bio-IT World Conference in Boston this past April.
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In her recent post on the FDA’s draft guidance on its proposed oversight of Laboratory Developed Tests (LDTs), Jen Wagner mentioned my interview with Genome Web’s Turna Ray on January 15, 2015. Turna asked me to address some arguments made in a “white paper” written by former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe on behalf of their client, the American Clinical Laboratory Association. The main point that Clement and Tribe made was that the FDA lacks legal authority to oversee LDTs, at least in the way that it’s proposing to do so. As I told Turna, I don’t necessarily disagree with their position; in fact, I’m skeptical about the FDA’s authority to do this. Also, like Jen, I’m not persuaded the proposed FDA initiative is likely to work well from a practical perspective. Nonetheless, I agreed to play along in a devil’s advocate exercise, making the counterarguments I’d make if representing the FDA. Here’s a brief summary of my arguments:

Source: www.genomicslawreport.com

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